Dialogue writing of orange and strawberry

Yet another cybernaut has arrived in search of homework: dialogue writing of orange and strawberry. Well, okay:

“Hello there, strawberry. What the hull is going on?”

“Aah, just the daily rind.”

Please continue this assignment in the comments if you so choose.

Many searches for homework in the form of write five sentences have ended up at Orange Crate Art. A post about five sentences from Bleak House started it all.

Five-sentence posts
The cat : Clothes : The driver : My house : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The rabbit : The ship : Smoking : The telephone : The world

Gamewell fire alarm

[As seen in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, earlier this year. Click for a larger view.]

This old fire alarm was on duty last spring. I hope it’s on duty still. Click for the larger view to get a better look at the logo, which recalls that of the IBEW. (See below.) You might be able to make out the words Fire Alarm Station and The Gamewell Co. Newton Mass., below the 655.

Though no longer based in Newton, the Gamewell Co. is still in business as Gamewell-FCI.

[FCI: Fire Control Instruments.]

*

December 16: Gamewell forwarded my query to Gary Spohn, an expert on old Gamewell equipment. Gary tells me that this style of box is a “1924 style,” a design patented in that year. This box was made, he says, between 1938 and 1950. A look at the innards would reveal more.

Thank you, Gary.

*

December 16: Gary dates the first version of the Gamewell logo to 1879. The first IBEW logo appeared in 1891. So it would appear that it is the IBEW logo that recalls the Gamewell logo.

*

March 2024: Here’s a Gamewell alarm in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.

An alarming sign

[As seen in a parking garage.]

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

William Faulkner on universities

William Faulkner, when asked if he thought it wonderful that a course on his work was to be offered at Harvard:

“I don’t know anything about universities. I ain’t surprised at anything they do.”

Quoted in Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974).

An Erik Spiekermann poster

[Poster by Erik Spiekermann.]

I like this poster a lot. It’s an edition of fifty, numbered and signed.

I also like Spiekermann’s “Move fast and get shit done” poster. And his explanation: “It was going to be ‘get stuff done,’ but I only had two f’s.”

And I like what Spiekermann says about looking at type.

A welcome sign

[A real road sign. No, really, for real.]

I thought of such a sign, looked online, couldn’t find one, and so made my own. You can too.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

Moby-Dick at Harvard

Julianna Aucoin, a Harvard undergraduate, has written an essay about reading Moby-Dick (sort of) in one night and discussing it in one two-hour seminar meeting:

Fumbling our way through the discussion, we misunderstood major plot points and mixed up the characters. Queequeg, Ahab, and Ishmael, all rather prominent presences within the work, became “his friend,” “the captain,” and “the narrator.” We leapt over important and edifying details and focused on themes and sweeping generalizations about the prose. By posing questions like “Is that scene homo-erotic?” and overanalyzing the secondary source we had also been assigned, we got through the seminar. The class was over and we never mentioned Moby-Dick again.

My experience of plowing through Moby-Dick reveals problems deeper than procrastination.

It’s sad to think of the faux mastery that passes for English studies in this account, and impossible to imagine playing the game, as student or teacher, without losing all intellectual self-respect. I admire Ms. Aucoin’s willingness to question the order of things.

I’m surprised that @English_Harvard is tweeting about this essay. Maybe they’ve only skimmed it. But it doesn’t surprise me that of all possible courses of study at Harvard, Adam Wheeler chose English.

[I’ve corrected Melville’s title in the quoted text.]

No college?

In The New York Times today, an article about Maurice Sendak’s estate. Lynn Caponera, Sendak’s housekeeper and caretaker, heads a foundation established by Sendak and is one of his executors:

Recently she decided to withdraw more than 10,000 original artworks Mr. Sendak had lent over decades to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where many assumed the bulk of his work would remain. The works are now headed back here, to a house museum being planned by the foundation, a decision that some are questioning. They are also expressing concerns about the ability of Ms. Caponera, 54, who did not attend college and has no formal business training , to shepherd a complex philanthropic foundation worth tens of millions of dollars. [My emphasis.]

I think it’s worth pointing out that Maurice Sendak too did not attend college and had no “formal business training.” It was Sendak who chose Caponera as executor and foundation president. And it’s Sendak’s will that stipulates the creation of a house museum in what one publishing person calls “the middle of nowhere.”

Someone always knows better, right? But people are capable of making their own choices, even if they never went to college.

[“The middle of nowhere”: Ridgefield, Connecticut, fifty-odd miles from Manhattan.]

Another Yosemite bug

I thought this bug was specific to Chrome, but no: Attack of the 50-Foot Save Sheet (Six Colors). The Yosemite bug that I discovered remains unzapped in 10.10.1. It too involves a basic interface element. Sheesh.

I used to suggest to students in need of a new machine, “Buy a Mac. You will be so much happier.” And I still think that’s the case. But it’s more and more difficult to agree that “It just works.”

“Day at a time”

Assistant State’s Attorney Ilene Nathan (Susan Rome) is questioning Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams) about his occupation:

“Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it?”

[Smiling .] “Day at a time, I suppose.”

From The Wire episode “All Prologue” (July 3, 2003).

Elaine and I are deep into The Wire, which I sometimes call Breaking Baltimore.